georgia cty
active meas doc jack abrams
russia troll led to prez win?!
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AN 7 25 PROSECUTED HUMAN TRAFFIC AND EPSTEIN PAL gISANE
Firing of 'high-profile' prosecutor shows Trump 'is not thinking clearly': analysis
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https://gregolear.substack.com/p/deconstructing-the-epstein-myth-what
...SK
Well, was looking at all of the criminals around Donald, and I had a head start with a piece of information that I had gotten in 2005—before there was even an imagination that this man would run for president. I think to the layman’s understanding, if you knew who Trump was, which people did, that he was political in any way, just maybe he had been and we learned that he had been.
In 2005, Trump had this new reality show with Mark Burnett. And so I had a circle of people that I knew. I’m a writer, screenwriter. So I knew folks in that circle with that man.
GO
Okay. Meaning Burnett.
SK
Yes, Burnett. And I had learned that Donald was in a tremendous amount of debt to some Russians. And it was threatening this new thing—this idea of him as this self-made, you know, billionaire, whatever, whatever the thing was, a successful businessman, because it was all about to crumble. And there’s been a tremendous amount of reporting since I learned that. Verifying all of that. So I had that information at the time, back in the day.
And so when he came down that escalator, I knew, I was like, “Oh no, that’s the guy that’s in debt to a bunch of Russian gangsters!” And so I started trying to figure out who those Russians may be. And then in doing that, I came across Jeffrey Epstein.
GO
Okay, interesting. So Trump to the Russians to Epstein.
## Tinker, Tailor, Mobster, Trump
March 31, 2020
SK
Yeah, well, organized crime—specifically Russian organized crime. And then trying to understand Donald and Fred, Fred’s empire, his father’s empire, which was built with the Genovese crime family. And then the building of Trump Tower in Manhattan that moved in—they had different territory as Fred would call it, as Donald has said on the record—that Manhattan wasn’t. According to his father, “That’s not our territory,” because it wasn’t, it was Gambino territory. For Donald Trump specifically to be able to build in Manhattan, develop in Manhattan, Fred arranged for, and Roy Cohn arranged for, the two crime families, the Gambinos and the Genovese to form what became known as a concrete cartel—all the five families were in there. And this was the bid-rigging over concrete contacts to develop in Manhattan. And it was called “the Donald Trump deal.” And so that was in the middle of it, for those U.S. crime families and the racket they were running, which is this very racket that Giuliani used to prosecute the five families. So…
GO
Four of the five families.
SK
Four of the five families. Castellanos was a holdout and then was killed, shot dead in the street. So that’s the history.
There’s way more than that. During that time, before the Russian mafia had really taken over New York—which it did; it rolled in in the late 80s, some of it even back to the 70s, but very specifically in the 80s and the 90s and just sort of rolled up a lot of the territories as their own. And they did it by laundering money through Donald’s casinos. There was a lot of ways that they did all of that. There was a very prominent Russian gangster named Ivankov, who had actually an office in Trump Tower in Manhattan, but he was ultimately caught, tipped off and caught by Andy McCabe’s team.
Like when you start learning about these characters, of what they were doing back in the day, both on the law enforcement side pursuing Russian organized crime and from the Russian organized crime side—the bosses and the key figures there were all in business in some fashion with Donald Trump.
Then in the mid early 2000s to like 2005, 2006, right around when I was hearing this stuff about him, what was happening was the Russians were wanting to keep using Trump to go internationally. So the properties: Trump Panama developing and Trump Toronto developing and Trump Georgia developing and all of these foreign developments, which we were watching. If you watch “The Apprentice,” it unfolds on “The Apprentice” as well. This sort of expansion of the Trump thing where he was just licensing his name to be put on these things, because he was really over-leveraged.
Like the one in Georgia, the country Georgia—the Trump Tower there, all they did was just stick a shovel in the ground, and a whole bunch of money was laundered. There’s Trump Baku, which, you know, there was quite a bit of reporting how that was probably a front for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Again, Iran and their corruption very closely tied in with Russian organized crime as well.
GO
Right. Adam Davidson in the New Yorker.
SK
So that’s the background. That’s why the Trump/Russia thing is not a hoax. Donald is the hoax. You know, he did. And there’s so much reporting and Trump, the company, Allen Weisselberg, all those people, they affirm this, they said, “Yeah, yeah, we took that money.” The problem with it is some of it was illegal, but a lot of it’s not illegal, right?
He couldn’t get a casino license in Australia, infamously. They would not give him a casino license because of his ties to organized crime, both U.S. organized crime and Russian organized crime.
GO
So a major Five Eyes power decided that Trump couldn’t have a casino license because of his ties to organized crime—and specifically Russian organized crime. Let’s just underline that because it seems important. Australia is, as they say, a real country, you know—that is one of our strongest allies.
SK
Right. Right.
So how you get to Jeffrey is, there was a time in the 80s where Donald was really having issues, and he was sort of over-leveraging himself. He was building in Atlantic City. He was doing these things and couldn’t get them funded. He always had a problem getting the money because legitimate banks would stop lending to him, which was the crisis he was facing in the early 2000s, mid-2000s. There was Deutsche Bank, but even Deutsche Bank was turning him down, so he had to go for this Russian money. You could get Russian money, you could get Chinese money, and the Chinese money hadn’t quite showed up yet. But the gangsters will invest in you. So the banks were difficult.
Now part of the stuff that made it hard to get finding from U.S. banks is because of what happened with him in the 80s with Bear Stearns. So there’s a guy that ran Bear Stearns.
(This is all the reporting done by Wayne Barrett. And I recommend everybody go read Wayne Barrett’s work on Donald and Fred Trump and that sort of “Trump Inc.” He did extraordinary work on that. He also did great work on Giuliani and showing what sort of a criminal and a fraud Giuliani was. And it still is, I guess.)
So Ace Greenberg ran Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns is the company that infamously went down in 2008 with all the credit-default swaps, all that kind of stuff that just crashed—you know, the Big Shorttype of thing.
But before that, they were a real player—Bear and Lehman and these other entities. Goldman Sachs. And so Donald had a very close relationship with Ace Greenberg. Ace Greenberg is the man whose daughter was Jeffrey Epstein’s student when Jeffrey Epstein was at the Dalton School. And Epstein did whatever he did at the Dalton School to leverage his just being a math teacher and tutor at this private school into working directly for Ace Greenberg.
So he went into the financial industry at Bear Stearns. And he didn’t come in as a low-level person and work his way up. He came in at a very senior level, and it caused a great sort of upset at Bear Stearns. Who is this guy? Where is he coming from? And why is Ace giving him this plum spot?
And he was handling private wealth management. And his big client that he had, that Ace gave him, was Edgar Bronfman, who’s Sam Bronfman’s son. Sam Bronfman, he established Seagrams, and he was Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano’s business partner during the bootlegging days. And Edgar Bronfman has a lot of ties to Russia as well, quite frankly. And it’s his daughters that were part of that NXIVM thing. That’s how people recognize that name, Bronfman.
GO
He’s Canadian though, right? Sam Bronfman?
SK
Yes, he was Canadian. So that was part of the bootlegging thing. Yeah.
But that was Jeffrey’s client, and he got into difficulties and troubles there at Bear Stearns with that particular client managing, you know, and he basically had to be fired. And Ace really resisted firing Jeffrey. And what I uncovered and discovered was that he didn’t fire him. He just moved him into Offshores. Jeffrey went into establishing offshore accounts and offshore money, sort of tax havens for Bear Stearns clients.
If you go into the Offshore Leaks database—which is where I found Jeffrey’s offshore accounts, some of them—you can see there are old Bear Stearns officers. In fact, Ace Greenberg’s partner at Bear Stearns is still connected and linked into those offshore accounts. So Epstein was very much doing that business, and he was doing that business for Bear Stearns right at the time that Bear Stearns was doing these wild, risky, money-backing things for Donald, for Donald developing his casino.
:{:{So thatis where I found him. And I’m like, “Who’s this Jeffrey Epstein, and what is this?” And then I started looking into Jeffrey Epstein, and I’m like, “My God, everybody’s some kind of sex-trafficking criminal.” He’s not the only one that was tied in with Donald’s business or his financial backing in some way that also was convicted for sex trafficking.}:
There’s another guy named Tevfik Arif, who was a big partner with Donald, who had that yacht with all the underage prostitutes and the trafficking that went on there. There’s a yacht, I think off of Turkey where they were finally caught, he was finally caught. So there’s the folks in Panama: his business partners in Panama were nailed for sex trafficking, international sex trafficking. And the people in Canada: there’s ties in there for his business partners in Trump Toronto and Canada, who were also Russian. The main partner there was the son-in-law of Semion Mogilevich’s business partner and consigliere—Semion Mogilevich being a great big Russian gangster.}:
And then there’s all the Craig Unger reporting on Mogilevich, that Donald was in fact laundering Mogilevich’s money himself. And that’s the man who originally compromised him. So that’s the money. It’s full of sex traffickers and it’s full of Russian gangsters.
GO
So let’s underline again Semion Mogilevich. That’s an important connection because Semion Mogilevich, if I remember correctly, was at one point directly working with Robert Maxwell. That was in one of those books, right?
SK
Correct. In Maxwell’s biography, Mogilevich is named several times. I believe the source for that was Ari Ben-Manashe, a former Israeli intelligence officer who also worked for the Kremlin. But that Robert Maxwell biography—this is Ghislaine Maxwell’s father—outlines Robert Maxwell as a Mossad and a KGB spy. That means that he was an intelligence officer. It looks like he also did—there’s quite an FBI file on him. He probably worked with U.S. intelligence at times, and it looks like he definitely worked for the Queen. He was very close with, very close with the Queen. He touched the Queen. There’s video of him, footage of him touching her, like walking alongside her and touching her like.
GO
He was friends with the Queen. Yeah.
SK
That’s very rare and weird and very strange.
GO
It’s very strange. Robert Maxwell also, when he died in 1991, in November of 1991, by falling off a yacht off the coast of the Canary Islands—as happens, I guess, all the time, so no foul play at all, none suspected; it’s weird how that thread keeps going up—but remember, he had defrauded the pensions of the company, the publishing company that he bought. So he was about to collapse before he died, like his entire...
SK
That’s right.
GO
…financial empire was a house of cards, and it was all bullshit. So that’s an important thing to keep in mind.
SK
That’s right. And he knew Donald. Donald knew him directly. There’s a lot of images and photographs. They were on the yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, that he named after his daughter. So yeah.
GO
They were on the yacht, in Page Six. With Ivana, which is interesting because Robert Maxwell is born Jan Hoch and is from Czechia. And Ivana Trump is also Czech. So I envision a scenario where the two of them are on the yacht talking in Czech, and Trump is just standing there like an idiot.
SK
I’m sure, yeah. Junior, I believe, is fluent in Czech. People underestimate Don Jr.
GO
Yeah, and Baron is fluent in Slovenian, yes.
SK
But you know, another character that was in that world with them, with Robert Maxwell—and it’s important because his money shows up in Jeffrey Epstein’s next big financial scam after the Bear Stearns moving him—is a man named Adnan Khashoggi, who is Jamal Khashoggi’s uncle. And there’s not a lot of Khashoggis, actually, by the way.
Donald knew the Khashoggis very, very, very well. Ivana called Adnan her best friend quite often. When Donald bought the one and only yacht he’s ever bought, he bought Khashoggi’s yacht. So he bought Khashoggi’s, yeah.
And Khashoggi was a known intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia, but he was at one point the wealthiest man in the world.
GO
He was an arms dealer, right? Wasn’t he an arms dealer?
SK
He was a big arms dealer. Yeah.
GO
I remember that, even in the moment, people knew who he was. Like, he wasn’t some hidden figure. I remember reading about him in the 80s. I didn’t know what these people were at the time. But I knew their names.
SK
Paul Manafort was also in this mix, Tom Barrack was in this mix. There were a lot of folks that we saw show up in Trump 1.0 as President, helping with his campaign, that were swirling around in this—what I call the underworld. But it’s where crime syndicates and intelligence services are just, you know, intertwined.
And that’s what MAGA is aware of when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein. They can kind of feel that there’s something odd there. There are intelligence services there.
Now, it’s important to point out that before Robert Maxwell died—there are several people who are credible witnesses and know what they’re talking about that have identified that Robert Maxwell was taking Jeffrey Epstein around and sort of introducing him as his protégé. So this myth—this lie—that Ghislaine and Jeffrey told that he showed up after Ghislaine’s dad died, that she moved to New York and that’s where she met Jeffrey? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. They knew each other before her father died or was killed or whatever happened off the side of that yacht. So that’s kind of key.
And then Jeffrey went from there to creating one of the biggest Ponzi schemes, the biggest Ponzi scheme ever before Bernie Madoff. He almost kind of invented it. That was called Towers Financial. And I talked a lot with Steve Hoffenberg; you talked with him as well. He was a tricky character. He’s passed away now, but he went to prison for quite a long time, and he got out of prison right at the beginning of Trump’s first term. The first person to call him when he was out of prison actually was Roger Stone, he told me.
But Hoffenberg was mortified with what Jeffrey had done with the victims. That reporting had kind of just come out when he was just out of prison. And he did contact the victims, and he did want to kind of make good. Because the money from Towers Financial was never fully recovered, Hoffenberg didn’t understand why he went to prison and Jeffrey got off.
I talked to Hoffenberg a bit. I’m like, “Well, what are some of the ways that someone gets out of being prosecuted for a big crime financial crime like this?” And it looks like Jeffrey very much cooperated with prosecutors. Now, there were a lot of criminals that were part of Towers; that was a big money laundering vehicle. Quite a lot of the money from Iran-Contra, Steve Hoffenberg suspected, was pushed—that Jeffrey got his hands on—it was pushed through Towers.
That is money that Robert Maxwell was in charge of that also disappeared around the time of his pension scandal. And so there was a lot of pressure on Robert Maxwell right before his death. It wasn’t just that his empire was crumbling. There was a lot about to be exposed of the kind of places he’d had his hands in, money that disappeared that he should never have been anywhere near it. And it exposed nation-states, intelligence services, doing what maybe they shouldn’t have been doing.
So that’s the world. It’s like a private intelligence rogue operatives. Private arms dealers like Adnan Khashoggi or the guy that Nicolas Cage played in that movie, Lord of War—like those guys, that world.
There’s also: you don’t have to just deal in arms or traffic in arms. You can traffic in kompromat, right? You can traffic in other things that would have value to intelligence services of both our nation and other nations. And it does very much look like that Robert Maxwell was in that business. It looks like Ghislaine took the mantle, and Jeffrey took the mantle from him and developed their own little operation. So all of the pieces are there for Epstein to have that connection.
And Towers Financial, I think, is also a great big piece that doesn’t get talked about enough, in terms of, What kind of deal did this guy cut with those prosecutors, that he got out of facing prison? And his business partner went in for 20 years, 18 years or whatever.
And knowing the kind of money, the kind of players that Epstein ran with, just with that one fraud and scheme alone—those are very valuable names, and a lot of money that he could have turned over to prosecutors to cut himself a deal. That could very well be the key to Alex Acosta’s phrase about Jeffrey, when he says he was told Epstein “belonged to Intelligence.” Because he would have some really big names in Towers, and really powerful players that maybe were on a sanction list, quite frankly.
GO
So just to review quickly, Towers Financial ran from 1988-1993. He’s now worked, Jeffrey has, as a math teacher at Dalton (where he got fired), at Bear Stearns in some weird capacity (where he got sort of fired). And then he went to work, if I remember correctly, Hoffenberg said Epstein went to work for Douglas Leese, who was another person in that world.
SK
Leese, yes—who was an arms dealer for the Queen. Right.
GO
And he, Leese, according to Hoffenberg, recommended Epstein to Hoffenberg by saying, “He’s smart and he has no moral compass.” So Hoffenberg knew he was going to do this Ponzi scheme, and he needed like a guy to help him with it. And that’s why he hired him. Like, specifically.
SK
And that would have been while Robert Maxwell was still alive or just sort of on his way out to the next world. Yeah. Right. All right around that time.
GO
Right. Again; so now, we’re all the way into the early 90s, and so far it’s money and offshores and arms deals and Russian mobsters and shady characters, but we haven’t even—we haven’t gotten to the sex trafficking part yet, right?
SK
Yeah, as far as we know, it wasn’t happening then. And that’s just—we only know what’s in those court documents, with what the prosecutors brought to light. And a lot of it’s still redacted. But yeah, then he’s setting up, and he’s got Les Wexner, you know, somehow come folding him in.
GO
Les Wexner being the guy that owns Victoria’s Secret and these other big retail chains. And that was the time when Jeffrey was walking around saying he was a model scout for Victoria’s Secret, you know, as a pickup line that he was using.
SK
That’s correct. There is a journalist in the Ohio area, Bob Fitrakis, who’s really good, a great muckraker, and he did a lot of work on Wexner and Wexner’s ties to organized crime. And Wexner as a potential…what’s called a non-official cover, a NOC, for our own intelligence services. Wexner has an airfield there in Ohio, a private airstrip, and there were planes coming in and out of there that Fitrakis believed and tracked to our own intelligence services.
GO
Right, and Wexner’s the guy that owns the lovely, huge mansion on the Upper East Side of New York, on East 73rd, where he’s like, “Why don’t you just live in my mansion? You know? Why don’t you Kato Kaelin this? And you just move in. I don’t need it, it’s fine, it’s good.”
SK
Right. Yeah. To Epstein, yeah, Wexner handed over the most valuable piece of property, the most valuable private residence in Manhattan to Jeffrey—just gave it to him.
GO
Which is, I think, I would say odd, unusual, strange, whatever word you want to use. Weird.
SK
It’s odd.
The other odd thing, and we talked about this this past week a lot, but we kept talking about it at the time, too. We do know that that all of these homes, New York, down in Palm Beach, out in New Mexico, the island and the plane, that these properties that either Jeffrey owned or had access to or were his in some way or form, all had surveillance technology wired throughout them. That’s in the underlying evidence in the court cases against him. So we’re not just speculating about this. It’s in the evidence. And you have to understand that we’re talking about properties that he was using for the—you know, for the abuse, while he abusing these minors and raping the minors.
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an 6 22
c**hristina Pushaw**, the spokesperson and press secretary to Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, has registered as a foreign agent of aformer president of the country of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, after a U.S. Dept. of Justice inquiry into her activities.
Pushaw’s attorney, Michael Sherwin, The Washington Post reports, says she was paid $25,000 for her work from 2018 to 2020. DeSantis was elected in 2018. According to a LinkedIn profile with Pushaw’s name, Pushaw began working for the Florida governor in 2021.
Sherwin told the Post that “Ms. Pushaw was notified recently by the DOJ that her work on behalf of Mr. Saakashvilli likely required FARA registration. Ms. Pushaw filed for the registration retroactively as soon as she was made aware.”
That LinkedIn profile also says Pushaw is the “Founder of an NGO [non-governmental organization] in Georgia (Eastern Europe) educating and empowering the next generation of young leaders,” and that she has a “Master’s in International Relations & Economics from Johns Hopkins University.”
For almost three years, from January 2018 to November 2020, the profile also says, she was a “Campaign Strategist” for a “Georgian opposition party.”
But in April Slate reported that “Pushaw said in a November 2018 interview with the English-language news site Georgia Today that she was in the country working with NGOs—and said expressly that she was not being paid to speak on Saakashvili’s behalf.”
“She was, in her own words, ‘not working for anyone who’s running for office in Georgia or who is holding office in Georgia or any foreign country.’ This would seem to contradict her LinkedIn page.”
Slate also called Pushaw “an aggressive Twitter user. On an indicative day this month, she posted on the site 83 times—a mix of original comments, retweets of conservative media figures and outlets, and replies to other right-wing users. Unfortunately for the historical record, she appears to have deleted all her tweets from the time before she was hired in Florida, which was in May 2021.”
The Editorial Board of the Florida Sun-Sentinel called Pushaw a “combative, divisive and highly partisan political operative,” in a piece titled, “The tweeting, deleting operative who does DeSantis’ distorting.”
The Washington Post also points to Pushaw’s activities on Twitter:
“Pushaw, a year into her tenure as DeSantis’s press secretary, has become a prominent protector of her boss and a fierce critic of the media. Twitter briefly locked her account last year after the Associated Press said the criticism she directed at a reporter caused him to receive death threats.”
Pushaw did not address the Washinton Post piece about her status as a foreign agent of a Georgian politician directly, but in her unique fashion, tweeted this:
===
https://medium.com/dfrlab/russian-tv-ties-biden-to-its-saakashvili-organ-trade-conspiracy-theory-ef9c7ce26660
Russian TV Ties Biden to Its Saakashvili Organ Trade Conspiracy Theory
Kremlin-controlled TV channel NTV accuses Joe Biden of covering up the Saakashvili family’s “role” in the global human organ trade
@DFRLab
@DFRLab
Follow
Jun 14 · 6 min read
(Source: EtoBuziashvili/DFRLab via YouTube)
As the 2020 United States presidential election comes closer, the Kremlin media targeted candidate and former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden by incorporating his name into a preexisting disinformation campaign focused on a former president of Georgia.
From May 21 to May 23, 2019, Russian state-controlled TV channel “???” (NTV) released a three part “documentary” about Georgia’s former President Mikheil Saakashvili, accusing him — among other things — of being controlled by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, blackmailing Ukrainian ex-President Poroshenko, and engaging in the human organ trade. At first glance, there was nothing new in the Kremlin media’s reports, with the exception of one detail: NTV claimed that Biden played a role in covering up the Saakashvili family’s alleged role in the organ trade.
By introducing Biden, who entered the race for the 2020 U.S. Democratic presidential nomination at the end of April 2019, into an old disinformation narrative about “Saakashvili’s crimes,” NTV likely aimed to damage his reputation ahead of the U.S. elections. Before announcing his candidacy, Biden had warned of the efforts of foreign countries — particularly Russia — to meddle in upcoming U.S. elections, as well as of the threats influence and disinformation operations pose to the democratic process.
Saakashvili and Putin: A History of Tension
Mikheil Saakashvili came to power after the 2003 “Rose Revolution,” a peaceful series of protests in Georgia that were followed by regime change and marked the beginning of Georgia’s pro-Western pivot. During Saakashvili’s presidency, Russia invaded Georgia and fought a brief war in 2008.
Saakashvili and Russian President Vladimir Putin have a long track-record of insulting statements toward each other: Saakashvili once referred to Putin as “Liliputin,” a reference to the little people in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Putin once threatened to hang Saakashvili “by the balls.” The tense personal relationship between the two leaders, as well as the Kremlin’s aggression toward Georgia, has repeatedly made Saakashvili a target of Russian state-controlled media.
Lies, Damned Lies, and the Kremlin Media
The conspiracy that the Saakashvili family had engaged in the illicit organ trade are not new. According to the Media Development Foundation, a Georgian media literacy nonprofit, amedia portal called Exclusive News published a fabricated video in 2016 allegedly released by the head of the State Security Service of Ukraine. The video purportedly told a story how Mikheil Saakashvili’s wife traded the organs of woundedUkrainian soldiers.
Fabricated video footage accusing Saakashvili family of trading organs of wounded Ukrainian soldiers. (Source: Media Development Foundation)
The video uploaded by the user ????????????? ?????? ????? (Ukrainian: Information Portal “Word”) has 351 subscribers and only seven videos on its channel — all of them related to Ukrainian politics. The video shows an unidentified person sitting with their back to the camera and telling a 10-minute story of how the organs were removed from Ukrainian soldiers and then traded, and how Saakashvili family led the business. The claims, however, were not supported by any actual evidence, as it was merely a story told by an anonymous person.
Anonymous individual tells a story of Saakashvili family trading organs of wounded Ukrainian soldiers. (Source: YouTube)
NTV revived the story for its recent “documentary” series, the first part of which primarily focused on the family’s alleged role in the organ trading business. Despite this particular disinformation narrative featuring in Kremlin-controlled outlets’ reporting for the past three years, the documentary constituted the first time the narrative included former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, accusing him of covering up the Saakashvili family’s “organs business.”
NTV is owned by Gazprom Media, a subsidiary of Russian energy company Gazprom, which itself evolved from the Soviet Ministry of Gas into a private corporation and is now a Russian state-owned company. As a result, the Russian government is able to exert de facto control of NTV via Gazprom’s media subsidiary. In 2018, Gazprom doubled its annual net profit by achieving record sales to Europe.
The three-part documentary, titled Saakashvili. The Battle for Ukraine,” belongs to a series titled “Based On a True Story.” The series describes itself as “exclusive footage obtained by the NTV team, as well as scenes that have never been published before.”
The Kremlin-controlled NTV’s three part “documentary” about Georgia’s ex-President, titled “Saakashvili. The Battle for Ukraine.” (Source: 1. YouTube/archive; 2. YouTube/archive; 3. YouTube/archive)
The program, however, is not based on evidence, but rather, on interviews with so-called “experts in the field” with unverified credentials, including some who remain completely anonymous with their backs to the camera. The tactic of employing fake experts is not a novel one for Kremlin-controlled TV channels. In addition, the EU’s East StratCom Task Force has previously identified the NTV channel in particular as a wellspring for disinformation narratives.
NTV’s introduction to the first part of the Saakashvili “documentary” began with a sensationalist line of questioning: “How did [Saakashvili’s] wife supervise the trade in organs of wounded Ukrainians?” “Why did Joe Biden cover up these crimes?” “What did Saakashvili blackmail Poroshenko with?” “Why did Poroshenko not give away the runaway Saakashvili to Georgia?” The same questions appeared in the program description under the video on YouTube.
The Kremlin-controlled NTV’s description of the “documentary” about Georgia’s ex-president Saakashvili. The video includes the only moment Biden appears in the footage. The highlighted part reads: “Why did Joe Biden cover up these crimes?” in reference to claims that the Saakashvili family had engaged in the illegal organ trade. (Source: YouTube)
Interestingly, despite making claims about Biden’s role, the documentary footage did not feature him; it merely flashed his image for two seconds and asked the audience to stay tuned for his role in the Saakashvili family’s criminal enterprise, implying a future exposé on the topic that has yet to materialize. The DFRLab did not find previous NTV programming to have made unsubstantiated allegations regarding Biden.
Spread of the Narrative
NTV’s YouTube channel has 5.5 million subscribers, but engagement with the video was relatively low: it garnered 12,917 views and 91 comments, some of which were negative comments about Saakashvili; roughly half of the comments, however, emphasized the inauthenticity of the video and deemed it Kremlin propaganda.
Using the online analytics tool Sysomos, the DFRLab scanned for mentions of the words “??? ??????” (“Joe Biden”) together with “????????” (which translates to “with organs,” in a Russian grammatical case) on online platforms in both English and Russian between May 23 and May 29, 2019 — from the day the narrative appeared to the day this analysis was written. Sysomos registered only 14 mentions of both terms together in Russian across all platforms.
Mentions of the keywords “??? ??????” (“Joe Biden”) and “????????” (“with organs”) in Russian during the period from May 23 to May 29, 2019. (Source: @EtoBuziashvili/DFRLab via Sysomos)
Sysomos registered only 22 mentions of the words “Joe Biden” and “organs” in English across all platforms within the period of analysis.
Mentions of the keywords “Joe Biden” and “organs” in English during the period from May 23 to May 29, 2019. (Source: @EtoBuziashvili/DFRLab via Sysomos)
The Sysomos results suggested that the spread of the narrative across Russian and English online platforms was very low. The scan, however, only registered observations from the surveyed week.
Kremlin-controlled media have routinely discredited the Kremlin’s opponents by using sensational headlines and recycling false narratives.In particular, the narrative that Saakashvili’s family engaged in the illegal organ trade has circulated in Kremlin-controlled media for several years. Introducing Biden into the existing narrative now, early in the former vice president’s 2020 presidential run, may indicate that the Kremlin media — similar to the U.S. media — sees Biden as the current front-runner in the race and therefore is seeking to diminish his standing through a disinformation campaign.
The DFRLab will continue to monitor the spread of this particular Kremlin disinformation narrative regarding Biden.
Eto Buziashvili is a Research Assistant with the Digital Forensic Research Lab and is based in Georgia.
Follow along for more in-depth analysis from our #DigitalSherlocks.
DFRLab
@AtlanticCouncil’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Catalyzing a global network of digital forensic researchers, following conflicts in real time.
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WikiLeaks cables claim Russia armed Georgian separatists ...
https://yyy.theguardian.com › world › dec › wikileaks-cables-russia-geor...
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Dec 1, 2010 - Russian secret services also ran a disinformation campaign against Georgia's pro-American, pro-Nato president, Mikheil Saakashvili, claiming ...
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Saakashvili's two cents on Trump, Putin and Mueller probe ...
https://eurasianet.org › saakashvilis-two-cents-on-trump-putin-and-mueller...
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When Russia Invaded Georgia - WSJ
https://www.wsj.com › Opinion › Commentary
Aug 7, 2018 - It happened in 2008 and foretold a decade of Putin's adventurism. ... Mikheil Saakashvili. Aug. ... In the U.S., Russian-funded disinformation on social media fuels the ... Mr. Saakashvili served as president of Georgia, 2004-13.
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Russian TV Ties Biden to Its Saakashvili Organ Trade ...
https://medium.com › dfrlab › russian-tv-ties-biden-to-its-saakashvili-orga...
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The 2008 Georgian-Ossetian/Russian War: Saakashvili's ...
https://gordonhahn.com › 2017/07/30 › the-2008-georgian-ossetianrussian...
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putin's asymmetric assault on democracy in russia ... - GPO.gov
https://www.gpo.gov › fdsys › pkg › html
141 Collective Defenses Against Disinformation and Cyber Attacks. .... For example, as Georgia and Ukraine moved closer to these institutions, the ...... attacks and President Mikhail Saakashvili's website was forced to shut down for 24 hours.
Vladimir Putin 'Likes to Lie,' Says Mikheil Saakashvili | Time
https://time.com › ukraine-russia-mikheil-saakashvili-vladimir-putin-lies
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Missing: disinfo | Must include: disinfo
The Georgian and Putin: A Hate Story - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com › 2009/04/19 › weekinreview
Apr 18, 2009 - SMILE In 2008, Vladimir Putin, right, and Mikheil Saakashvili still shook ... 'Look, we can do business with Russia, with President Putin, he is a ...
Missing: disinfo | Must include: disinfo
Just Like Obama, Trump's Russia Policy Speaks Louder Than ...
https://thefederalist.com › 2018/07/18 › just-like-obama-trumps-russia-poli...
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ISIS, Ukraine, Georgia: In Putin's World, It Is All Connected
https://www.forbes.com › sites › melikkaylan › 2015/11/10 › isis-ukraine-...
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https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/08/22/georgia-worker-rights-safety-risk
Tbilisi) – The safety of workers in Georgia’s mines is at serious risk due to insufficient government regulation and resulting mining practices that prioritize production quotas and put workers’ safety in jeopardy, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
The 60-page report “‘No Year without Deaths’: A Decade of Deregulation Puts Georgian Miners at Risk” documents how weak labor protections and limited government oversight have allowed mining practices that undermine safety to flourish. Georgian labor law does not sufficiently regulate working hours, rest time, weekly breaks, and night work, and does not provide for government oversight of all labor conditions.
“Thousands of workers will be at heightened risk until Georgia regulates working hours and creates a system to inspect the broad impact of working conditions,” said Corina Ajder, Finberg fellow at Human Rights Watch. “It is entirely in Georgia’s power to protect workers and improve conditions for their health and safety.”...
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https://theconversation.com/environmental-reporting-can-help-protect-citizens-in-emerging-democracies-115822
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Transparent in principle, not in practice
Lack of access to information was also a common complaint, despite transparency laws entitling the public and press to government documents.
For example, when Tsira Gvasalia, Georgia’s leading environmental investigative journalist, reported on the nation’s only gold mining company, she was unable to obtain full information on possible government actions from the local prosecutor, the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Agriculture or the courts. “The company has a close connection with the government,” she noted.
Georgian citizens weren’t much help either. In the small mining town of Kazreti, Gvasalia saw thick layers of dust on roads and bus stops from uncovered trucks transporting ore to the company’s processing facility. When she asked residents how pollution affected their everyday lives, people were “very careful. Once I mentioned the name of the company, everybody went silent. … Everyone worked for the company,” she said.
Who sets the priorities?
In my sources’ view, environmental coverage was not a priority for Georgian journalists and media owners, especially at the national level. Lia Chakhunashvili, a former environmental journalist now associated with the nonprofit International Research & Exchanges Board, observed that covering the environment “is not as glamorous as being a political reporter or on TV all the time or having parliamentary credentials.”
“If the environmental sector becomes a priority for the government, journalists will try to cover it better,” Melano Tkabladze, an environmental economist with the Caucasus Environmental NGO Network, predicted.
What coverage exists is weakened by misinformation, disinformation and “fake news.” Much of it originates from Russia, which briefly invaded Georgia in 2008 to support two breakaway provinces seeking independence, and vehemently opposes Georgia’s efforts to join NATO and the European Union.
Tabula’s Chergoleishvili asserted that Georgian journalists could not distinguish fake news from legitimate sources. As an example, Gvasalia described planted reports on Facebook that claimed a hydroelectric project would “elevate local people” and provide “great social benefit.” “Seventy percent of this needs to be double-checked,” she warned.
Cultivating better reporting
Although Georgia’s media sector remains politically and economically vulnerable, I see two encouraging signs. First, young journalists are increasingly interested in covering the environment. Second, Georgian leaders strongly desire to join the European Union, where multinational eco-issues such as curbing climate change and building a pan-European energy market are priorities. This step would be significant for Georgia, given the trans-border nature of environmental problems, the country’s progress toward energy self-sufficiency and its strategic location.
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Covering the environment is challenging and can be dangerous in any country. But fostering environmental journalism in emerging democracies like Georgia is one way to hold government officials and powerful businesses accountable.
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He advised opposition leaders in Russia and helped elect a pro-NATO president of Georgia (only to help elect his Russian-backed replacement eight years later). An international adviser pledging to deliver “commitment, discretion and high-impact solutions” to clients, Patten has also worked in multiple countries where on-the-ground political consulting requires a cadre of heavily armed security guards.
Still, even after Cohen had joined the Trump Organization, he harbored personal political dreams. In 2010, Cohen mounted a second unsuccessful campaign, this time for the New York state Senate. Among his donors in that race were shipping magnate Oleg Mitnik and tobacco tycoon and New York real estate man Howard Lorber, one of Donald Trump’s closest friends.
At a Trump Tower press conference in early 2011, Cohen took the public stage as an international dealmaker. “Seven months ago, at the request of a dear friend of mine fromGeorgia, Giorgi Rtskhiladze, I traveled to the Republic of Georgia to explore several real estate opportunities on behalf of Mr. Trump,” Cohen said in his unmistakable Long Island accent. He then introduced Trump and the then-president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili. Cohen continued to expand his role within the Trump universe. It had become simultaneously global, national and highly local. The Trump Organization’s business model had shifted, from building high-end Manhattan properties to scoping for international licensing deals, particularly in the former Soviet Union. Cohen, along with Trump’s adult children, headed up this effort.
The ostensible purpose of the press conference was to talk up a planned tower in the city of Batumi, on the Black Sea coast. But most of the questions centered on Donald Trump’s possible run for president.